Bandcamp – ONLINE PRESENCE
Your website is one of the most important tools you have as an artist. It’s a place for people to discover and listen to your music, contact you, purchase your merchandise and more. Your website acts as a promoter, publicist and dj and it does all this 24/7 for anyone in the world.
In addition to the positive benefits of a website, having a home base on the web is one of the basic building blocks for becoming a successful band. It is essential to have a home base that ties in other online tools such as facebook, myspace, flickr, youtube and other community based sites for musicians. Still, there are a large number of bands that set up a myspace page thinking that it is both sufficient to act as a promotional machine and that they have (in very little time) accomplished the step of cementing their online presence. By employing only Myspace they are rendering themselves mostly invisible to the greater web audience.
One of the barriers to actually setting up a website seems to be the lack of knowledge surrounding how to accomplish this. Also, bands seem to think that getting a website is something that is difficult or more time consuming than regular utilization of Myspace or other community based tools. Getting your own website set up can be done simply, beautifully and free, depending on what you’re looking for.
Come to February’s Bandcamp and learn effective strategies for maintaining an online presence that utilizes a full complement of websites and techniques. Led by Matthew Wettergreen, this session will be hands on, including demonstration of available sites and a discussion of strategic planning based on available time commitment.
Bring your laptop.
There will be an ENCORE session of this month’s Bandcamp at the end of the month on 2/22. If you can’t attend on Sunday, check it out at the end of the month, or come twice to pick up a new perspective and plan for your online presence.
Things that you will learn at February’s BandCamp
-    Improved tools beyond Myspace for online presence
-    the Wheel and spoke concept of web presence including a home base and digital outposts
-    designing a strategy for employing these digital outposts and selecting the ones that work for your band
-    Learn how to set up your own website in 15 minutes
-    Learn how to measure metrics for your site to determine your audience and what content is the most interesting to your visitors
-    An overview of other digital outposts other than Myspace that are just as effective for artist promotion
-    How to integrate your digital outposts to your website
-    Free email accounts for your band
-    Places to seed your music, video
-    Where to sell online: amazon, itunes, cdbaby, napster
-    Locations to post your photos online (flickr, photobucket, etc.)
-    Ideas for driving traffic to your site
WHAT: Bandcamp ONLINE PRESENCE
WHEN: 2/1/09 1-3pm AND 2/22/09 1-3pm
WHERE: Caroline Collective, 4820 Caroline Houston TX
9 Responses
Matthew, want me help with this?
this sounds really helpful!
is bandcamp open to the public?
I’ll be there.
Looking forward to it as always.
Jake
http://vimeo.com/2993535
Aaron, Bandcamp is always free and open to the public. See you there!
Matt: nice meeting you, however briefly on Wednesday. You guys are doing great, great work.
Grace & Marc have convinced me that even non-bandmembers can benefit from this. SO, I’m going to test that theory at the make-up session on February 22.
Meanwhile, I’m just about to start putting up a Web site. Any reason I can’t go ahead and start playing with it before the Camp? Or should I wait?
Looking forward to it!
[...] gave a presentation at last weeks’ Bandcamp about how to set up your own band website with WordPress. I put together this document for the [...]
[...] gave a presentation at last weeks’ Bandcamp about how to set up your own band website with WordPress. I put together this document for the [...]
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